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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8954050" data-attributes="member: 6777737">Yeah, when I hear "balance" I think of the ability of the GM to translate a desired campaign narrative into a design idea for a scene, and then... the scene plays out as desired. Balance is when the GM wants to plan an encounter to accomplish something and -- with minimal information about the composition and abilities of the party -- is able to create encounters that all players can participate in and enjoy that also achieves the narrative goals of the wider game.Critically, the GM should never have to stop and completely redesign an encounter just because one of the PCs is out sick that week. It should not take a huge amount of system mastery to achieve this, nor should the discrepancy between a PC from a player with low system mastery and a PC from a player with high system mastery really be that different. The bottom line is that PCs of the same level should always feel like peers. 5e is moderately better than 3e was at higher levels, and the "sweet spot" where 5e largely works is levels 3-8 or 4-10. That is as good as or better than 3e or AD&D. They just don't seem interested in extending that.Part of it is that nearly all social skills are siloed into CHA. This means if you play a character class that happens to have Cha as the prime requisite -- which is essentially always a full caster or equivalent -- then by sheer coincidence you also happen to be better at the social tier than any other class while also being just as good at combat.I really wish someone could explain to me why Persuasion and Deception need to both be CHA skills, or why they should be separate at all. Why are Dex and Cha so overrepresented? It's really ironic that Str, Int, and Wis aren't the top attributes given how the game started out!There are so many potential designs that could be real improvements on the casting system.Nope, I think OGL and the OneDND have shattered the illusion of D&D for me. There's so many glaring flaws, and there's no real impetus to address any of them.</blockquote>

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